Visa: There is No New Data Breach

Recent Alerts Relate to Older, Pre-Heartland Investigation

eartland Payment Systems (HPY) may be the only "new" data breach, after all.

A week after at least two banking institutions and a state banking association reported a new data breach that had been announced to them by Visa, the credit card company now is saying that its recent alerts to card issuers were actually part of an existing investigation and aren't "related to a new compromise event."

In its statement issued on Friday, Visa says it "has provided the affected accounts to financial institutions so they can take steps to protect consumers. In addition, Visa is risk-scoring all transactions in real-time, helping card issuers better distinguish fraud transactions from legitimate ones."

Visa did not name the entity that was breached - and gave no reason for the continued anonymity.

Heartland Update

In developments in the Heartland case, a Philadelphia law firm filed a class action lawsuit against the processor on behalf of two banks and three credit unions. The complaint was filed by Chimicles & Tikellis in U.S. District Court in Trenton, NJ on February 20.

The five institutions named in the complaint are Amalgamated Bank, New York, NY; Matadors Community Credit Union, Chatsworth, CA; GECU, El Paso, TX; MidFlorida Federal Credit Union, Lakeland, FL; and Farmers State Bank, Marcus, IA. All the institutions say they have had to re-issue "substantial" numbers of credit and debit cards because of the Heartland breach.

While there is no official accounting how many institutions, cards or consumers are involved in the Heartland breach, more than 565 institutions have made public that their customers' cards were compromised by the Heartland breach, which was first announced on Jan. 20.